


A Unified Theory

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asexuality, Banter, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 15:20:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's had enough sex in his life to know he's not particularly interested in having more.  But when Jim expresses a physical interest in him, he decides it's worth investigation – because even if he's not drawn to the sex, he will always, always be drawn to <i>him</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Unified Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HisMightyShield](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HisMightyShield/gifts).



> Thanks go to my dear friend for providing the prompt I needed to get all of my scattered Jim/Sherlock feelings into one (somewhat) coherent piece. I hope you enjoy it, even if you've had to listen to me ranting about it for the past month. Many thanks also to MagZ for beta-reading and for offering so much wonderful insight! All remaining mistakes are, of course, my own. I'm afraid the dates don't jive exactly with those given on the show's various official blogs, but if Moffat and Gatiss can't be bothered to try to fit things into a functional timeline I don't really see why I should have to do so.
> 
> Prompt: Sherlock Holmes finds sex distasteful. He isn’t a blushing virgin or inexperienced, he just doesn’t particularly like it and for the most part could go without. This isn’t something that should change. (As in, his opinions about sex shouldn’t be shaken by the course of the story.) Sherlock is not easily aroused, and the idea of penetration is, to him, a bit abhorrent. He is attracted almost exclusively to Jim Moriarty’s mind, and really he’d be perfectly content to sit with him and exchange witty banter as opposed to wet kisses. But Jim has a healthy, maybe even over-active, sex drive and as much as he’s turned on by Sherlock’s mind, he really … really likes the whole package. This shouldn’t be a story about submission and domination, but one about compromise that reflects their deep unconventional respect for each other.

Jim sat at the centre of the bar, three polished, spindly chairs set out to either side of him. Two were unoccupied, including the one directly to his left; he let his elbow loll into that empty space as he turned his pint glass in his hand and contemplated the faint, sticky traces of foam drying along its walls. He was undoubtedly content with the thickly bitter taste hanging over the back of his tongue, with the warm weight of it in his stomach – and yet, he wanted another. Wasn't that always the way? People were fond of saying that nature abhorred imbalance, but in his experience the opposite was true. Balance required energy; balance was unnatural. Left to its own devices, nature hurtled spectacularly over the nearest edge and gave itself up with rude abandon to whatever force happened to sweep it off its feet. He ordered another beer.

Sherlock had seated himself some fifteen minutes ago in the chair furthest to the right. There was a bored businessman between them, his boxy coat drooping off his chest in a soft, fatigued sort of way, and Jim thought it was all rather silly, this play at subtlety – if that's what it was. Sherlock didn't strike him as the type to delude himself into thinking he lived in a spy novel, but here they were, perhaps a metre and a half between them, and for a quarter of an hour they'd said not a word. Was he supposed to be playing a game? He hadn't come here to do so – at least, not such a tired and pointless one.

 _This is stupid,_ he tapped in slow, sloppy Morse code with the corner of his coaster. Never let it be said that he wouldn't play along. He was and always had been fantastically sporting.

A deep, frustrated sigh erupted from the end of the bar. Sherlock's head sank down to his hand, his dark hair engulfing his fingers. " _What's_ stupid?"

The man between them shifted in his seat, his eyes sliding with politely disguised anxiety towards his neighbour. Jim smiled. _Sitting here like this,_ he replied, his gaze fixed innocently upon the full glass in front of him.

"I'm waiting for you to leave! That's what you want, isn't it? You're right, this _is_ stupid."

That proved too much provocation for their unsuspecting companion. "I beg your pardon –"

"Oh, not you," Sherlock said with a savage outward wave of his hand, that elegant, vicious gesture that said so very clearly: _obviously_.

 _Manners,_ Jim tapped, but the third wheel was already dropping money on the bar and making his escape, quite understandably unwilling to spend any more of his evening beside a man who, aside from wearing a scarf and greatcoat in August, chose to carry on conversations with persons invisible. Within thirty seconds he was gone, escaped to the brighter hotel lobby that stretched out behind them, leaving half a glass of red wine standing as a fittingly mediocre monument.

Sherlock twisted in his chair, and Jim saw for the first time that he was drinking coffee. _Jesus_. "You're finished now, I hope," Sherlock said. The twist of his mouth was fetchingly accusatory.

"I never started anything. I was having a drink –"

"In the same building as the murder I'm investigating –"

"And you sat down. And it didn't occur to you, apparently," Jim continued, pausing to have a slow sip of his drink (and relishing the impatience blooming in Sherlock's face like crystals forming on a window), "to sit next to me. So I hardly thought it would be polite to impose myself."

"Did it occur to you that I might not want to be seen with you?"

"Not at all." Particularly not since Watson had seen fit to tell the entire internet he'd be off to New Zealand for a few weeks. In the absence of Baker Street's resident nag, Jim couldn't think of any reason they ought to avoid one another.

Sherlock scoffed. His shoulders hunched as he drew his coffee cup to his mouth, but the furrow in his brow was too pronounced, the displeasure in his eyes too marked for Jim to take any of it at all seriously. Sherlock's theatrics might have sufficed to fool the people he needed to fool in the course of his business, but they were far too over the top, too plastic to pass with Jim. And he didn't expect they were meant to, really. It was all performance. Jim didn't mind – he appreciated it, in fact. Sherlock in his unaltered form was sharp, brilliant, rough, an endless complexity of edges. That complexity liked to dress itself up as a simple, logical blade, and Jim had a deep sympathy with the desire to dress up. The raw data transactions that made up life were more intriguing when they had to be accomplished under a shifting and arbitrary system of parameters. He liked masks. He liked a little song and dance. He liked the soft, petulant slip of tongue over Sherlock's lower lip.

Setting his cup back in its sugar-packet-littered saucer, Sherlock straightened once again. "Why are you here, then? This wasn't one of yours." 

"No, of course not." Not that he didn't have his share of irons in the Colombian ambassador's fire, but as it happened the murder of one of the man's more discreet aides in his hotel room was pretty far outside the ambit of his business. "But when I saw it in the news I thought of you."

"I hope I'm not quite that predictable," Sherlock said, but there was more pride in his slight edge of a smile than there was regret.

Jim heaved his shoulders up dramatically. "A man has to make a living, doesn't he? Trust me, I know. I hope you had fun, at least."

"It wasn't a complete waste of time." He cocked his head to the side at a charming, concessionary angle. "There's nothing new under the sun, but some methods of taking a life are more novel than others."

Jim grimaced. "Nothing new? No wonder you're always so dour."

"You know it's true." Sherlock glanced toward him, a muted glow of curiosity in his eyes. It was very pleasant, Jim had to admit, to be looked at in such a way – almost like a teacher, to have his mind teased out of him bit by bit by someone who almost knew it, who almost saw it in the mirror. "Everything's just – permutations. The pieces are there; it's only the combinations that are innovated – and even those, not very often."

"Honey, if I thought that, I'd have pitched myself off a bridge years ago." He reached out to nudge the abandoned glass of wine fondly in Sherlock's direction. "And so would you. You don't have to be jaded, not for me."

"I'm not." Sherlock's spoon clattered against the rim of his cup, and Jim supposed he meant it. Sherlock certainly wasn't capable of putting on such a convincing show of apathy. "No more than anyone should be. No more than I'd expect of you."

There was almost too much truth to it. What a shame to spend such a mind, such a talent on the dead, flat nothingness of scepticism. "Such a cynic," Jim muttered, casting him a disapproving quirk of his eyebrow as he turned back to his drink. "Who did you learn _that_ from, I wonder."

"So why are you _really_ here?" Sherlock asked, taking that mantle and wrapping himself in it quite unapologetically. 

"Because you are." Well, better qualify that. "And because I was in town. Couldn't ask for a better show." And because sometimes he walked the path that nature showed him – sometimes, he let himself be guided by the vague, unknowable impulses that seemed to come from some blind room inside of him, and hoped that the destination would make their meaning more apparent. Would offer evidence that they had meaning to begin with. There was something in Sherlock that drew him as to a flame, and he wanted to spread it out and pin it down for study.

Although the thought of harming it made him strangely – sad.

"Well," Sherlock said, turning his eyes down to his saucer with an aloofness that couldn't quite cover the pleased curve of his mouth. "You missed it. I suppose I could reconstruct it for you. Unless you've already figured it out –"

"Oh, no – going backwards is your business. I can tell you how _I'd_ have done it."

"Don't." Sherlock smiled, albeit at the bartender's back. "I'd rather preserve the surprise."

"If I promise to keep my mouth shut, will you give me an encore?"

A flicker of hesitation began to pass across Sherlock's face – crime scene, sealed access, _your boys at the Yard will be unhappy, yes, I know_ – but it died before it was fully formed. When his eyes met Jim's they were bright and beautiful with greed. "Since you ask so nicely."

Inclining his head, Jim took one last sip of his beer and stood up to pull on the light jacket he'd left hanging over the back of his chair. Waste was never something he'd considered a sin. "Up we go, then. A private performance." Not that this – all of this – hadn't been just that.

But performances were tailored to audiences, and as he followed Sherlock out of the bar, into the lobby, and up the grand, carpeted stairs, the minor players – servers, guests, luggage-laden uniforms – began to fall away. The stage grew smaller and smaller as they advanced into the narrower upper corridors, and then they were alone, two, walking single-file in the silence towards the room containing Sherlock's latest pretty little mystery, an intimate chamber piece after the Met's opera buffa.

It was in the dim, warm light of that hallway that Jim had his first real opportunity to appreciate the perfection of form in the man in front of him. He'd done it from afar, of course, traced the interaction of angle and shadow around those shoulders on surveillance video, in photographs, during the precious few moments he'd actually spent in their physical presence – but never before, not once, had he been so close and so much at liberty. Their meeting at the pool had been meticulously scripted – like everything else Jim did, like every other time he'd reached out from his usual radius of silence and control and touched something new. He was a man who took risks, but it gave him no pleasure to cast his fate to the winds. 

With Sherlock, though, it thrilled him to loose the moorings a little.

He wondered, watching the slant and motion of that coat and the hard stop and start of the frame beneath, whether that indefinable pull could be something as simple as physical attraction. He doubted it; there was too much in Sherlock to attribute his unknowable _X_ entirely to sex. But there was no denying it was a pleasant prospect nonetheless, more than pleasant – sex was always, for Jim, a pleasurable undertaking, but almost invariably a solitary one, regardless of the partners involved. It was worthwhile for its own sake, a perfectly constructed biological crescendo that at once obliterated and clarified; pure, reliable, chemical mathematics. It was one of the easier and more charming ways to bring order to the entropic cacophony that sometimes broke out inside of him, even if it was only a short-term reset, a temporary patch. It was a resolution, and a resolution could be a solution, sometimes. Who knew how the usual equation would be altered with Sherlock on the other side? The answer to their little problem didn't exist in the physical realm, of that he was quite certain, but he couldn't help but wonder whether something heated and concrete might help bring them closer to the bottom line.

Sherlock stopped at the appropriate door, clearly marked with three parallel bands of yellow tape clinging from one side of the doorframe to the other. "I'm sure I can rely upon you not to leave fingerprints."

Without bothering to roll his eyes, Jim ripped the tape away, letting it hang like so much dead kelp along the wall. "I'll send someone in to clean up later." And when Sherlock leaned in to try the door handle, Jim neglected to move out of his way, reaching up instead to lay his hand against the warm slope of Sherlock's face. It was a shift of mere inches to bring their lips together, to move his mouth, soft and easy, over Sherlock's. 

If Sherlock felt any surprise, he expressed it only in stillness. He moved not at all; Jim's tongue slid unopposed past the dry, hot flesh to slip against his teeth, which parted tentatively, too slowly. Jim tasted nothing – coffee, sugar, male, nothing important – and felt little more than body heat, the faint drumming of a steady pulse, the gentle scrape of his cotton jacket against Sherlock's heavy wool. It took perhaps three seconds to realise that the most jarring absence was that of the usual movements of the hands, the shifting of weight from one foot to the other, the reciprocation of proximity that most people made automatically. At first the realisation was expansive, almost joyful – this was different, Sherlock was _different_ , he'd always known he would be – but it shrank back inside of him a moment later. With anyone else, he might have pushed forward past the chilly, unresponsive wall, flirted and _convinced_ , anything to start the infallible chain reaction of blood and nerves and white-hot emptiness, but this –

This was different.

Jim pulled back. His hand fell from Sherlock's face to the lapel of his coat, which was scratchy and limp with wear. Sherlock was looking at him, his brow carefully blank, but there was an intensity to his expression he couldn't hide, a tightness about the eyes that meant, Jim knew, that something inside him had been piqued – even if it wasn't exactly what Jim had been aiming for.

"Well," Sherlock said, as unconvincing as ever, "this _is_ disappointing."

Jim tipped his chin up, investigating with some interest (and perhaps some passing regret) the fine, slight wetness he'd left in the corner of Sherlock's mouth. "Most people wait at least a few minutes before coming to that conclusion, thanks very much."

"Most people don't know that you know better than to act this – to be so expected."

"Oh, you didn't expect that."

"Nevertheless." Sherlock brought his heels together in a sharp but somewhat shoddy impression of attention, and inclined at the waist, dipping nearer to Jim's face and letting his smile spread unchecked. "It is _expected_." Jim could see the question burning just under the surface of his face – _what are you playing at?_ – and was more pleased than he should have been, perhaps, that Sherlock decided not to ask it. They were still pretending to know all the answers, then. Still posturing for one another. Still dancing that dance.

So of course he answered it anyway, just to keep the upper hand. "Just a little problem I'm working out," he murmured – there was hardly enough distance between them to require more volume than that. He smiled. The sterile hotel air had already removed every trace of Sherlock from his mouth. "I'll get there in the end."

Sherlock straightened. "Not that way, you won't." There was a little warning in his voice, but nothing like reproach. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a blank key card, and slid it into the lock looking thoroughly self-satisfied. "But might I suggest room 315?" And he opened the door into the dark, bloodied room.

***

The season had turned by the time they met again, and the setting had deteriorated; the hotel had been left behind for a bare, dingy flat, uncomfortably draughty even though the windows were wedged shut as though the locks had been driven home with a hammer. That was annoying, and not even very informative – Sherlock had hardly crossed the threshold when he'd realised the man who lived here was no housekeeper and no great specimen of finesse or patience, and now that he had stalked around the place for fully three minutes, he had harvested every secret it possessed. The only thing the chill on the back of his neck could possibly tell him was that it was still miserable outside, and damp.

Outside was the last place he wanted to be, in any case. These poorly-kept, slightly musty rooms were a perfect paradise, because Jim had brought him here and pulled out a key and let him in without saying word one about why.

Like all good things, though, it had to fade. Even the best mysteries only survived for so long, and this was nothing close to Jim's A-game. It was very obviously the residence of one of his employees – barely ever lived in but with a five-year dent in the carpet under the coffee table, which meant almost constant travel; a false back (albeit a good one) in the kitchen cupboards for cash and a long-unused handgun, which meant criminal; a really quite hilarious selection of business management and negotiation self-help literature on the bedside table, all bought in one go according to the receipt being used as a bookmark, which meant naïve ambition. A salesman, Sherlock realised as he was rifling through the few suit jackets and garment bags in the mostly empty closet – Jim Moriarty employed a travelling salesman. And why shouldn't he? Criminal contracts didn't sign themselves any more than did legitimate ones. He smiled, pleased and amused with the little detail he'd acquired, a charming ornament for the vast, mysterious room in his mind that was Jim. Still – it had been easy. Nothing special.

He knew he shouldn't be disappointed, of course. Wherever Jim was would be quite enough for him, be it ever so desolate a place. All the same, he felt uneasy: discomfited, perhaps, by the reminder that every truth outed itself eventually, that there was no object, no question, no man that one could seek for eternity.

"Either you don't pay him enough, or he's never heard of a tailor," Sherlock said as he advanced back into the living room, running his eyes again over the smoke-stained ceiling and its dust-encrusted corners. "But you didn't bring me here to tell you he's cheap."

"No." Jim was leaning against the worktop separating the living room from the narrow kitchen. Jeans and tweed and a slim teal necktie gave him a curiously juvenile appearance – very much like a student. No doubt he'd had some other role to play this evening, but now he was relaxed, smiling, only rolling his shoulders forward and back every few moments with a certain restless energy. "I may not be a deductive genius, but I know a home manicure when I see one. Why _are_ we here, then?"

Sherlock snorted. "Are you considering promoting him? I'd say he's been on the same chapter of _Getting to Yes_ for about two months." It was a glib deflection, but he didn't mind making it; he wanted a little more time to think. There was nothing to be gleaned from Jim himself, which Sherlock knew from experience – for a man whose skills lay in a different direction from Sherlock's own perfect interpretation of detail, Jim was exceptionally good at controlling his own behaviour and appearance, such that any deductions drawn would normally be quite useless. It was a strange feeling, to look at something and know that it was lying to him in a way he'd once thought impossible – but it allowed him a certain freedom simply to _appreciate_. He looked at Jim and liked what he saw although it told him nothing.

Because it told him nothing.

"I'm really not." Jim slouched a little further into his peaceful, lounging posture, smiling in a way that Sherlock found as familiar and as intimate as the figure that greeted him in the mirror when he stepped out of the shower. "You might say he's on the chopping block."

"And why might that be?"

"What – you want a hint?"

"What's bringing me to his flat, if not a hint?" He was already weaving it all together – the lifestyle, the occupation, Jim's apparent displeasure, the sudden silly penchant for _Investments for Dummies_. It wasn't a theory, of course, as a theory would have been premature, but it was a structure. "You think he's hiding something – otherwise, you wouldn't have brought me to sniff it out for you – and you think he's hiding it here. But I can tell you with perfect confidence that the only things he thinks he's hiding are several thousands of pounds cash and a habit of snacking in bed. So what is it? It won't be anything personal – you've been here before; you know he doesn't keep anything personal here."

Sherlock slipped past Jim to stand in the kitchen, keenly aware of the shadow Jim made on the cupboards, and waited impatiently for it to shift, for Jim to turn and watch him. The irritation he felt when it didn't made him throw open the refrigerator with unnecessary force. He'd already seen all of this – chocolate protein shakes, peanut butter, a bottle of vinegar that didn't need to be refrigerated, olives to go with the bottle of vodka in the freezer, a pack of mouldy, whole wheat sandwich bread, a bag of withered carrots, a desiccated bunch of celery. He hadn't thought to check the lot number on the carrots, having determined by the date on the protein shakes that the man's last grocery run had been three weeks ago, but now he lifted the ripped bag and checked the smudged black stamp along the front. They'd been bought a few months ago; it was probably the same with the celery, although its packaging, if there had been any, had been discarded. So, August – about the same time as the shopping spree at Waterstones.

Turning on his heel, Sherlock saw Jim's face turned ever so slightly toward him, the corner of his mouth and the shadow of his eyelashes just visible in the corona cast by the lamp in the living room. Sherlock smirked. "Your man made a change about three months ago – or tried. Late summer's not the usual time for ill-fated resolutions, is it? What makes a man want to improve himself all of a sudden in the middle of the year?"

"Not a pay rise, I'll tell you that much." Jim finally condescended to turn around fully, propping his elbows on the worktop and lazily stretching his back. "New prospects, maybe."

"What – someone trying to recruit your people away? Please." He kicked the refrigerator door shut and turned to peer into one of the cupboards, paying more attention to the white of Jim's face in the corner of his peripheral vision than to the cobwebs collected on the dark shelves. "You're the name no one says. Surely you don't get poachers."

"Not everyone's got the job security of a consulting detective, I'm afraid."

"No, but this man must have some. He must have some impressive skills indeed, if you're bringing me in to investigate." Sherlock swung the cupboard door far enough out of the way that he could look Jim in the eye again, giving him a serious quirk of his eyebrow. "I'm very expensive when I know my clients can afford it."

Jim's smile spread like ink seeping through paper. "I'll get you dinner."

"At any rate, if he'd been approached a few months ago about changing jobs, either he'd have been gone already – in which case I wouldn't be here – or he'd have turned down the position, in which case the abnormalities would have stopped, and you wouldn't care enough to look into it. So I'm afraid your conclusion won't fit. Tell me," he said, leaning forward and settling just inches away from Jim. "Has he been disappearing? Is that the trouble? You've been losing track of him, haven't you?"

The careful lift of Jim's eyebrows – encouraging – was like a drug. Sherlock grinned unabashedly and bent in closer, bold with self-satisfaction. "Then send him a cigar and be done with it. Congratulations are in order, Mr Moriarty. Your man is a proud, if probably ineffective, father. The sudden burst of self-improving spirit can't mean anything else – it might have been a love affair, of course, but given how much he travels he wouldn't have time to strike up anything serious, and if he were the sort of man to do something as stupid as go behind your back for a woman, I imagine he'd be dead already. Children, though – children make even careful people think they can make something of themselves by reading stupid books and swapping in carrot sticks for crisps."

There was a hint of chagrin in Jim's mild scowl and the wrinkles it made around his eyes, and Sherlock couldn't blame him. It was an uninteresting answer, mundane, and it didn't speak very well of Jim's associates, either. "So when he drops off the grid for a day at a time," Jim said, his voice slow and heavy with something like disgust, "he's going to visit his _kid_."

"I'm afraid so. Nothing very intriguing – soap opera stuff."

"Don't sell soap operas short," Jim said. He straightened, squaring his shoulders with a quick twist of his neck. "Well, that's that, isn't it. I'll line up a chat with him later. How awkward."

"It must be." Sherlock watched Jim, unmoving, hoping he wasn't about to be thrown out but unwilling to let it show. He sniffed. "Having people on _payroll_." It was bad enough relying on someone to let him onto crime scenes or into the morgue – expecting them to do any real work, or having obligations to them, would be ridiculous, a stone around his neck.

Jim shrugged. "I haven't yet discovered how to be everywhere at once, I'm afraid. It's an unfortunate necessity. Well – I shouldn't lie. Some of them I really do find charming. Silly things – but now, my dear, why don't you see if you can sleuth around for a corkscrew." He bent and disappeared for a moment beneath the counter, returning with a bottle of wine from the rack, and for a moment Sherlock felt something settling inside him happily. "You may not be on payroll, but our friend owes you a little treat."

So Sherlock started picking through the man's sparsely-populated drawers, pushing past cheap flatware and other implements in various stages of grime and rust, all the while keenly aware of Jim's eyes on his shoulder, on the side of his face. His confidence had, for the moment, retreated; Jim had the answer to his question, the job was done. What came _next_ was as indecipherable to him as a mask. He knew he wanted there to be something – he didn't want to leave. It wasn't altogether an unpleasant feeling, because it was so decidedly novel, but he hated floating in the dark. He needed something to grasp on, something to help him grope his way towards the solution. It didn't have to be easy – God, he loved it when it wasn't easy – but with nothing, he was useless.

He curled his fingers around a grease-spotted sommelier tool and remembered Jim's hand on his face and the vegetable scent of the stuff he combed through his hair. Was that it? Was that the next step? It was a handhold, if not a very defined one. He couldn't make it out now any better than he could before; it really had surprised him that Jim had approached him _physically_ , which meant of course that he'd dwelt upon it at length, but he hadn't been able to puzzle it out. Their relationship was such that he knew it had to be something more than simple sexual desire, and he considered it quite apart from the question of whether Jim was gay or not, whatever _that_ meant. He wasn't inclined to put any stock in labels of sexual orientation when it came to people like Jim, like himself, but he supposed he would have to concede that it was through his own distorted lens that he was seeing that –

"Jesus, it's not an apple. Give me that."

Sherlock looked down at the bottle in his hands. He'd been peeling the foil off with the corkscrew in perfect, narrow strips. He smiled. "Thirsty?"

"Men like me have very tight schedules," Jim said, drumming his fingers in a syncopated line across the counter. 

Sherlock stabbed the cork. "There are no men like you."

"That's good, flattery will always get you somewhere – but wine will get you further. Put it out of its misery, will you?" 

With a reproachful glance that Sherlock hoped hid the fact that he felt a bit as though he were standing on shifting sand, he pulled out the cork and turned to take two glasses from the hanging rack that was thankfully positioned far enough away from the stove to avoid the spatter of the oil that so obviously made the base of everything this man ate. They were dusty, but otherwise unobjectionable. He poured.

Sherlock nudged Jim's glass towards him; Jim rested his fingers across the thick, seamed glass of the base, and Sherlock decided he'd had enough of watching and wondering and trying to pull anything useful out of the fabulous nest of lies and nothingness that was Jim Moriarty, and he walked around to stand beside the coffee table. He might not normally have advocated diving in as the best way to test how deep the waters were, but nothing about this was normal. As he'd hoped, Jim came to join him, leaning against the arm of the sofa and raising his glass.

"To the little – what is it? A girl or a boy?"

"I'd be guessing." Sherlock drank without waiting for the end of the toast. "Does it matter?"

Jim rolled his eyes, stretched his arm out far enough to touch the lips of their glasses together, and took a long, almost savage drink that ended in a grimace.

The corner of Sherlock's mouth twitched upward. "You chose it." And chose to make a scene about it, which went without saying.

"There wasn't much of a selection."

"You didn't have to make a selection at all, if you didn't want to."

"Maybe I wanted to keep you a little longer."

Sherlock tamed his smile with another sip of wine. "You don't need wine to do that."

"No. Maybe," Jim said, reaching up to push his fingers through the knot of his tie, "I'm trying to get you drunk."

"Tedious."

"Maybe _I'm_ trying to get drunk."

That sounded decidedly unlikely, but Sherlock conceded he didn't know enough about Jim to rule out some form of habitual alcohol abuse. Still, as a pastime, it hardly made a good fit with the rest of him. Jim was in every way controlled, and while Sherlock knew from experience that substance abuse wasn't entirely incompatible with a need to be very firmly at the helm of one's own self, he couldn't see –

Well. That was a pointless line of inquiry; there was no data. Sherlock had already posed a question for himself tonight, and if he wanted to answer it he'd better set about discovering the hard facts. "Maybe you just wanted a glass of wine." He stepped closer; the leg of his trousers brushed against Jim's jeans where they curved over his calf. 

"Maybe, maybe, maybe –" 

But Jim's sing-song mimicry was cut short as Sherlock touched his face, careful to place his fingers and the heel of his palm as close as possible to the places Jim's had been when their positions had been reversed. Every experiment had to be repeatable, falsifiable. He waited, making note of every jumping muscle or variation in his pulse. He didn't know what he was doing, but maybe it would make itself –

"What are you doing?" Jim asked.

He _would_ ask the only question Sherlock didn't want him to ask. Sherlock's frustration must have shown in his face, because Jim laughed and drank again, the edge of his lips curling under Sherlock's thumb. "Sorry. That wasn't fair, was it?"

"You like this sort of thing." Sherlock knew he didn't have to elaborate. He didn't move his hand; Jim's face felt nice, bonier than he'd expected.

"I really do. Sorry to disappoint." 

"It's not disappointing. Just …" Just _normal_ , and the normal in Jim was curious indeed. "Why do you like it?"

Jim raised his eyebrows. "There's a question you don't hear every –"

"Oh, stop it." Sherlock dropped his hand to Jim's tie, straightening it over the centre of his shirt. "I asked why _you_ liked it."

"You know –"

"I really don't." The fumbling he'd got up to at school had only ever been boring, and when he'd moved past fumbling at university it had been worse than that, at once dreary and stupid. There was something fundamentally ridiculous about shoving a part of one's body into somebody else's, quite aside from the issues of hygiene involved. The sensation itself wasn't bad, but it was nowhere near enough to make him want to take his clothes off and pretend for hours at a time that he enjoyed panting and rolling around in someone else's bed.

Jim ran his tongue along his lower lip, tracing Sherlock's metacarpal with his thumb. "It's a distraction, like everything else – a longer-lasting one than some."

"A chemical one."

"Exactly. You do know. Not the most precise tool, but … It makes everything stall." Jim lifted his eyes to him, and Sherlock took a moment to appreciate how effectively they gave the lie to that saccharine old adage about windows to the soul. They were walls, or windows to nothing, and they entranced him. "Sometimes all you want is a good stall."

That didn't answer his question, though. "I already give you something better than that. I don't think you come to me for anything as commonplace as a a _good stall_."

Jim grinned. "Oh, you do. Did I offend you? I _am_ sorry. No – I only wondered, that's all. I thought with you it might be different. Something else."

There was logic in that. How could it not be different? They were like no one else. Sherlock couldn't fault him for wondering. "It might be."

"I suppose my schedule's not so full," Jim said, stretching his legs out a bit further and fitting his thumb into the pit of Sherlock's palm, "that I can't find out."

"Ha." But Sherlock didn't object when Jim leaned up to kiss him; his question hadn't yet been answered to his satisfaction, and there were few things that made him ache with the need to _know_ more than the parts of Jim he hadn't charted. Hearing him talk about what this did for him was one thing, but seeing it, collecting the data for himself, wasn't an opportunity to be missed. Jim's mouth on his was a lot like any other mouth, warm and tinted with alcohol and softly forceful: the usual kiss. 

But no one else's mouth had ever driven his heart rate up to where it was now without trying a hell of a lot harder – and no one's ever would. Jim was always a question, Jim was always dangerous, Jim was always clever, and next to that – what was affection? What was attraction? What were good intentions or professions of love or promises? What was _love_? Nothing. Worthless. 

Boring.

Jim's hand slid up into Sherlock's hair, and Sherlock found he didn't mind. The time was passing more quickly than he expected it to. Instead of wandering off to other subjects and returning only in punctuated intervals of irritation to the physical present, his mind was very much engaged in the way Jim's teeth were worrying at his lip, the way his tongue went from hard and narrow to soft and flat. If he couldn't claim to be aroused, he was interested, and that was infinitely preferable anyway.

Sherlock was pleased when Jim broke away to set his glass aside – all the better to inspect him. His face was only slightly flushed; his eyes had that distant cast that dilated pupils tended to produce. But those signs were no more telling than they'd have been in anyone else. Jim's blood was up. Nothing out of the ordinary. What was out of the ordinary was that Jim, at least, was capable of expressing himself without being stupid. It was nice to have a subject who could _talk_. Doing this with anyone else had always felt so mechanical, as though he were interacting with a machine capable only of reacting to levers and switches and crossing wires. Jim was alive; Jim was a man, and that was a compliment he reserved for … Well. For Jim. 

"What do you mean by 'stall'?" he asked quietly, in deference to the very short distance between them. He wanted to know. He wanted to understand more than Jim's face could tell him.

"Stall." Jim stood, wedging one foot between Sherlock's ankles, advancing against him. "Stop. Well – slow." His hands descended along the sides of Sherlock's throat, thumbs edging into the soft space underneath his jaw. "It's like … a flood. Not to be too on the nose." Another kiss, hungrier, but still restrained. "Like swamping the circuitry – I'm mixing my metaphors." Jim pressed his tongue to the hollow of Sherlock's throat, and Sherlock tipped his chin up obligingly. "It breaks everything a little. It overloads. It stops the impulses, the synapses. It forces a reboot. It makes everything lie idle and dead and empty for a few minutes while you try to figure out which switch to throw to get it up again. Stall."

The recognition was instant but fleeting, like recall from a scent or from a certain angle of sunlight. "It makes everything – white. For a minute."

"Mm." Jim was pressed against his chest, the lapel pin on his blazer digging into Sherlock's ribs. 

Sherlock stepped back to settle against the wall. They might as well not have to worry about support. "Like cocaine."

Jim looked up at him again, an easiness around his eyes. "I wouldn't know, honey."

"Not at all?" He tucked that away, pleased with himself for uncovering it.

"I've always been a good boy."

"Of course you have."

He experimented with a few different, trifling things over the next couple of minutes: matching Jim's breaths, mapping all the abnormalities in his figure, the shape of his waist and his hips, the placement of fat deposits. It wasn't germane to his question, but it was all Jim, and therefore all worth knowing. It was when he decided to slip his hand past Jim's belt, beneath his waistband and into his pants that the two goals seemed to converge. Jim's breathing hitched into a vocalization and his whole person seemed to soften and curl in, to cleave to Sherlock's shape. His cock shifted against Sherlock's hand. 

"At this point," Jim said, breathing his words against Sherlock's neck, his twist of a smile apparent from no more than the brush of skin on skin, "I think it's considered polite to make inquiries."

Sherlock smiled. "I don't want to fuck you." It would seem so performative, so pro forma. _Drink, kiss, fuck._ It would be fake; he'd never liked it when it was fake, and while he was willing and eager to give himself to Jim in furtherance of this very worthy study, it couldn't be like that. It couldn't be something that made him think of the absurd boys he'd known at Cambridge, something he would sneer at and resent. "And I don't want you to fuck me, either."

That didn't seem to pose a problem. Jim's reaction was unflagging. "What _do_ you like?" he asked, making a fist in Sherlock's shirt just above his hip and tugging the fabric out of his trousers.

"I don't, really." He met Jim's eyes. "But you do." It sounded too mawkish and he wished he hadn't said it, because of course it could be misinterpreted as a self-sacrificing offer or a gift, which it really wasn't – but he should have known better than to be afraid of that. Jim just nodded, grinding into Sherlock's hand with a quiet sigh, and continued pulling Sherlock's shirt out, running his cool, dry hand along the skin he was exposing. Sherlock supposed they were so accustomed to asking questions of one another that it went without saying that he wanted this, even if he didn't _want_ it; that it was worth something to him, even if it didn't pay out in quite the way everyone else expected it to. 

It was when Jim dropped to his knees that he began to feel a little wary. When Jim unfastened his belt and unzipped his trousers Sherlock let them fall around his ankles, but didn't move to step out of them, or to kick away his shorts when Jim dragged them down past his knees. He could feel the wall, rough with plaster and at least four coats of paint, against the bare skin of his buttocks, and Jim's hands lay on his quadriceps, and Jim's mouth was moving in toward his cock, which wasn't even half hard, and this really wasn't what he wanted. "I wish you wouldn't," Sherlock began to drawl, because if Jim's mouth was going to be _occupied_ this was going to be terminally boring, and he wouldn't get any of the answers he wanted at all – but he stopped, waiting with the beginnings of relief, when Jim's tongue only found the inner, uppermost curve of his leg. 

"Wouldn't what?" Jim murmured, passing his lips over the tender skin there with a gentle scrape of his teeth.

Sherlock let out a breath. "Just don't get too quiet on me." He didn't want silence, he didn't want anonymity – that would be a waste. He wanted to know Jim; wanted it, probably, with the same part of the brain that was feeding Jim's more tangible desire, because they were twins in their own way – only reversed, mental chiral opposites. He watched the nearly imperceptible flash and fade of red – of arousal – in Jim's face, and wanted nothing more than to reach down and touch it. Fingertips made much better sensors than his thighs. 

"No," Jim agreed, sucking in a breath before licking a long, slow, hot line across his gracilis. "That would defeat the purpose."

It was a comfort to him that they agreed on that point, but all the same, the time – and it couldn't have been more than thirty seconds each go – that Jim spent sucking and tonguing at his inner thighs seemed too long, frustrating concessions to the logistical necessity of … of what? The side of Jim's face was hot and a little rough against his leg, his hair tickling Sherlock's scrotum and the underside of his penis. Sherlock reached down to give himself a tug, a half-hearted attempt to push himself into at least the middle stages of physical arousal, but the most beneficial effect was that now he could better see what Jim was doing, the pink, mottled flush that his tongue and teeth and lips had brought up to the surface of Sherlock's legs. It was a strange feeling; not pain or irritation but simply stimulation, a concentration of feeling that heightened the weight and the evaporative coolness of Jim's breath against his wet skin.

"There are easier ways to achieve this," Sherlock said, shifting his weight to one foot to free at least one leg of his pants and trousers and widen his stance. "But you like this. Why?" _This_ , he assumed, was simply lubrication, and he could think of at least five different methods available just from what Jim's man had in his pantry that would be both faster and more effective. He wouldn't pretend his stomach didn't turn a little at the thought of using food, but speaking strictly on the subject of efficiency – there were options. 

Jim smoothed his thumb over one of the dull, red imprints his teeth had left. Then he kissed it; his lips felt very full and very soft, and Sherlock wondered whether that was his own heightened sensitivity or perhaps swelling of Jim's mouth. "Because I like making people feel things." Definitely swelling; his lips were dragging behind his words. "The reactions are always fascinating. It's the best part – well, the best part before the best part."

"But I'm not reacting."

"Oh, please."

Sherlock's brief rush of adrenaline at the thought of being _observed_ made very little sense, because of course he had never for one moment forgotten whose company he was keeping. In Jim's presence he moved and felt and acted differently, and it was all very conscious – but still, the idea that he was performing in some way he didn't even realise made every part of him come to attention. Being read and being dissected and being understood made him feel so very open – he loved and hated it at once, craved and mistrusted it. Perhaps it was erotic. It seemed to fit the definition.

"A non-reaction is a reaction." Jim stood, dragging the back of his sleeve over his mouth before shrugging his jacket back and casting it to the floor. His tie hung askew across his chest and his shirt was warped around his middle, tugging at his shoulders. "But you _are_ reacting." He leaned closer, planting his hands on the wall at either side of Sherlock's ribcage – and as Sherlock wound his arms comfortably around Jim's neck, he supposed it was true. He was welcoming him; that was something. That was everything.

There was a zip of leather on denim, and Jim's belt hit the floor. As accessories went, it was thoroughly unnecessary; his jeans didn't slip an inch from where they clung to his hips until he shoved them down, pants and all, to his knees. His erection stood out from him, red and eager, and Sherlock glanced down into the dim cavity between them to study it.

Jim caught his mouth with a kiss, nudging his face upward again. "We can forego any deductions you might be considering," he said dryly, dropping one hand to Sherlock's leg and urging it carefully inward.

Half a smirk curved up onto Sherlock's face. "You have a deeply alluring mind." 

" _Deeply alluring mind_ ," Jim muttered, giving a reproachful pinch to Sherlock's side. Sherlock laughed and braced himself against the wall as he pressed his legs closer together, touching now. Jim slid into the nonexistent space between his thighs with a slight compression of his mouth that Sherlock memorised: a perfect, flat shape into which he could press his own mouth later, perhaps over tea, perhaps on a case, in full sight of Lestrade and John and even Mycroft, and none of them would ever know, would ever even guess who it was that was on his lips, that lived behind his face. 

The colour rose higher in Jim's cheeks as he thrust slowly, easily – it floated up to the corners of his jaw, into his forehead where it cut deeply into his disordered hair, which Sherlock smoothed with precise, perceptive fingers. Jim's eyes were shadowed – so deep set – but when they flashed up into the light Sherlock was ready to observe. Desire was easy to read in and around them, but it was more than desire; Sherlock rolled _I want you_ around in his mind until it was moulded into something more useful: _I want you, I want to be with you, I want to be you._ But even that had too many awkward edges, because language hadn't been formed with men like them in mind, had it? _I want you, I want to be with you, I want to be you, I want am you, I am you, I you, I._

He sighed. The muscles in his shoulders relaxed. "And how do you _feel_ , Mr Moriarty?" he asked, his voice dark and deep and teasing, but for once covering nothing. His hand rested on Jim's heaving chest, fingers tangling in the soft folds of his necktie.

A brief hesitation while Jim leaned in to taste his mouth again; then a slow smile, and Jim's fingers working into the dips and curves of his hips. "Cloudy, actually."

"Cloudy."

"You know." Jim's breath was faster, so much more present in his voice than Sherlock had ever heard it before. "You know. Dissipated. Spread out, in – in suspension."

A memory from years ago surfaced then; dim, dank mist over a dead winter field suddenly illuminated by the sun pushing past a tree; light hanging inside the vapour, particles and particles, even and golden. In suspension. Cloudy.

He would have been jealous, intensely jealous of that feeling, except that he felt it too. It was a fine balance, the osmotic perfection of a system finally running at equilibrium. _I am you._ "I do know." For the first time that night he felt a suffusion of heat in his chest and under his collar, and he imagined his blood pushing through him like roots through soil.

The silence that followed was not empty, and it took him by surprise – it wasn't boring. It was a repudiation of the insufficiency of everything that surrounded them; of words, of space, of a humanity that barely deserved the name, of everything that was not _them_. There was a layer of Jim rutting into Sherlock's wet and reddened legs, and there was a layer of Sherlock chewing his lip as he watched, his own mostly flaccid prick in his hand, ignored, thighs sticky with saliva and then with Jim's come. But that was only the sheet hanging on the scaffolding of the mundane. Inside, away from the clumsy construction of the rest of the world, there were two men and one person and a question, a mystery that was infinitely satisfying because it was its own answer – because it was circular and unsolvable. It was a game without an end, a pit without a bottom, a free forever fall.

Later, leaving two glasses and an empty bottle and a rumpled carpet behind – obvious, obvious signs that the world would nonetheless miss – they split into two and went out into the night again; they moved on the random grid of London's roads and underground tunnels, but the corners and switchbacks and meandering turns were only minor deviations from the shared orbit, the single curve that would inevitably see them collide again with all the grace and certainty of gravity.


End file.
